ritain pledged Friday to give more than $100 million to increase the salaries of thousands of nurses and other health workers in Malawi, and to increase the number of medical staff being trained in the impoverished African nation. The aid will help Malawi try to offset the drain of nurses to Britain.

Malawi's health system, overwhelmed by the number of AIDS and malaria cases and already severely understaffed, has been further damaged by an exodus of nurses to Britain and other richer nations. The rate at which women die in childbirth has doubled in a decade, and life expectancy has dropped by a decade in 12 years, to 38 years in 2002 from 48 years in 1990.

Partly because of the severity of its crisis, Malawi has become a test case of how Africa will cope with shortages of medical personnel, even as wealthier nations provide billions of dollars in aid to help the continent survive onslaughts of disease.

"Malawi has emerged as a flagship of the problem and of efforts to fix it," said Dr. Richard Feachem, who heads the Global Fund to Combat AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

"If Malawi can show strong leadership and ideas and demonstrate real progress on human resources, other countries will be motivated to take similar steps," he said.

In a study released last week, a research group estimated that Africa needed to add a million health workers, tripling the current number.

The infusion of British financing, which will increase Malawi's overall health budget by 30 percent, is part of a broader $200 million, six-year package that will make it possible to increase salaries for more than 7,000 health workers by 50 percent, lifting the pay of a registered nurse to about $2,850 a year and of a doctor to $3,500. The Malawi Health Ministry says it hopes to have sufficient aid to double health worker salaries by 2007.

Norway, Sweden, Taiwan, the World Bank and the United Nations Children's Fund are among the other donors to Malawi's health system.

An estimated 1,200 trained nurses live in Malawi but are not working. The government hopes to attract hundreds of them back to work.